This is your SolarWakeup for July 5th, 2023
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 28th, 2023
Intersecting Auto And Grid Markets. Why didn’t any auto manufacturers ever get into the business of owning gas stations? For 100 years. OEMs made cars, utilities generated and delivered electricity and oil majors drilled for oil, refined it and delivered it to you via local gas stations. Today, EVs are propping up new manufacturers, OEMs are getting into charging networks and generating electricity, oil majors are making major investments into charging networks and so are utilities. Meanwhile, can you really distinguish one provider from another except for one very important customer requirement, does the station work when I arrive at the charger? We’ve seen the massive transition to the Tesla network in recent weeks, you can almost consider the charging standard won by the Tesla NACS plug at this point. This gets even more interesting when you look at the storage market intersecting with grid and charging infrastructure.
How Georgia Leads Cleantech Factories. Seems like Georgia is taking win after win with new factory announcements for clean energy as the Secretary of Energy heads to the land of peaches to take a victory lap stemming from the IRA. But how did this happen? It wasn’t because the elected officials in the State or those that the State sends to DC were ardent supporters of the policies that make this happen, so what other requirements made companies excited to invest billions?
Note About Inverters. Lots to digest on the inverter article but keep a lookout on more regulatory requirements for solar inverters, power plants controls and storage EMS applications. NERC and other regulators are unhappy with how little ride through and resilience that solar inverters have had recently especially with so much capacity coming online. The requirements for cybersecurity are also expanding across agencies looking at the topic of industrial controls.
Programming Note. We’ll be off for an extended Fourth of July weekend. Today is the last edition of the week and we’ll pick back up next Wednesday.
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 27th, 2023
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 26th, 2023
Solar Shifts Grid’s Weak Point. No way around it, it’s hot out there. We can’t see what the grid pressures are in Florida but in Texas the grid has been on the verge of major issues, reaching nearly 80GW of demand for over a week. There have been outages, calls for voluntary demand side management and major price spikes. Billions of dollars will exchange hands and hopefully customers don’t have unfixed rate schedules. Because this is a heat wave related spike, solar has been a mainstay in the daytime production, releasing generation side pressures that the grid operators would see without solar. That means that solar’s shoulder times has been the pressure point for the grid. There’s no doubt that ERCOT, and most other ISOs, need nearly 1x peak demand in resilience with dispatchable assets or generation.
Era Of Factory Growth. Another major factory win, two phases this time, with Vikram solar. The first phase is a solar module factory worthy of $250mm of investments but the second phase brings over $1bb for an ingot/wafer/cell factory. All of this in Colorado!
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 23rd, 2023
Resi Storage Proliferation. Companies are either doubling down or getting into building a home battery. Yesterday it was Lunar and today Panasonic, both making announcements on the topic. This week, batteries in VPP environments in Texas were able to sell energy into the wholesale market for over $5 per kWh, which seems like an anomaly but possible a sign of the energy market ahead.
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 22nd, 2023
The Promise Of Cleaner. And Cheaper. Every new data point shows that solar is increasingly the cheapest option in more geographies. We’ve moved past putting solar in deserts only and now can produce clean energy cheaper than all other forms. The next iteration also makes that clean and cheap energy much more dispatchable using energy storage. I still hold out hope that the financial drivers of existing solar farms will drive the enhancement of the offtake contracts by offering generators the amendment needed to make that solar plant dispatchable. So here’s the message to anyone in a CCA or utility that reads this newsletter, take a PPA off the shelf and call that asset owner and ask what the PPA price increase would be to add storage to that site. Just make the call and realize it’s insanely accessible, right now.
Access Is A Feature. Not a bug, and we’re talking about the lack of access to the grid. Given the above, i.e. cheap renewable energy, the massive queues in the interconnection pipeline do not have aligned interests across the board. We should be comfortable with having much greater capacity reserves and more time focuses renewables.
At The Summit? I'll be talking around 9am this morning on the future of energy storage and how it is growing both in deployment and manufacturing in the US. Come say hi!
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 21st, 2023
The Solar Summit. Busy travel week for me but will get you the commentary as possible. Make sure to catch up with me at the Solar & Storage Summit in San Francisco on Thursday morning if you are at the conference. We’ll be talking about the incredible impact that the IRA has had on new factory announcements and the expansion of available technologies in the marketplace.
<ERCOT’s Need. You’ve seen the ERCOT price maps undoubtedly which means that the market needs more infrastructure to be built. This is another reminder that the storage pipeline in Texas is ready to be built out in order to build the resilient grid that consumers deserve.
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 20th, 2023
The Grid We Have. It’s hot in Texas and across the Southeast but ERCOT is likely to break records over the next few days and nearly hit 80GW of demand yesterday with less than 10% capacity reserves. Resilience is earned through robust price signals within the market that enable investments to be made in order to ensure the lights turn on when you hit that switch. During Winter Storm Uri, demand hovered in the 60GW range. It came down to the reliability of the generation that remained available plus decreased access to energy for consumers. Back to today, 5GW of reserve isn’t going to make a reliable grid. Going forward we need more price signals from regulators in order to turn up the reserve as the demand grows and grow it will. I’ll make a bet that we see a 100GW demand within 5 years.
What Could Be Possible. The easiest thing for any grid operator would be to expand the price signals, i.e. markets, for technologies that exist in the 21st century. Let’s start with energy storage, these technologies can do much more than what the current markets ask an asset to do. For example, short term grid resilience dispatches to power plants are much better served by storage. Storage can also turn solar plants much more intelligent, imagine if offtakers allows solar PPA generators to add an amendment to make the solar generation dispatchable. The second powerful tool for grid reliability would be to create a real market for dispatching home demand and smart home devices. This will be more of a must have when cars become EVs in every driveway. If a real virtual power plant market were priced by operators, real flexibility would become available.
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 16th, 2023
What’s Your Security Plan? If you’re not listening to folks in DC and grid operators, I can assure you that the security of your solar and storage plants will need to be taken into account. That will include bringing your cybersecurity and data plans up to par, elevating your asset management standard and possibly bringing your industrial controls package into compliance. This is no small thing, solar can make our break a grid resiliency and as an operator/owner of those plants, you’ll be asked to ensure compliance.
Jobs To Build Homes For Jobs. It’s not just solar jobs that’s booming, but also the jobs to build the factories that will support solar supply chain.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for June 15th, 2023
More Guidance Arrives. The big one is here, guidance on the ITC transferability and direct pay provisions including who is eligible for the direct pay. Amongst those eligible for the direct pay provision are governments, tax exempt entities (including many cooperative utilities), the TVA and Native American tribal governments. Transferability will open up the market for buyers (and brokers) that will start bidding on your tax equity to resell to their eligible investors. We’ll be interested to see how close credits get to 100% as demand increases for a somewhat limited supply.
Relatable Congress. When it comes to climate change Congress has been questioning scientists for decades, and I don’t mean when someone asked Senator Kerry about his political science degree. But more often than not, members of the House do not have much real life experience around climate change so it’s great when a member has learned experiences. We need more of that, hopefully a Wakeup reader will run and win!
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann